Addressable Agents

OpenClaw had a moment and other companies are releasing similar features (Notion scheduled agents, Perplexity computer use, etc).

But they’re all missing the same thing (it’s very McLuhan).

They’re all trying to invent “the next computer” — they want AI to be an interface paradigm shift like terminal → GUI, desktop → laptop → mobile. (After mobile, VR/AR/XR was the theoretical successor, with middling to bad results.)

It feels like the thing that’s going to make AI actually useful is giving it an addressable identity.

And maybe, at least to start, that just means “an email account”.

The truly useful agent can’t just be in one app — it has to be in any app. It can’t just act as me, it has to be something else.

In every traditional UI shift, it’s still me doing the action, using a new surface.

• I sit at my desktop and buy a plane ticket.
• Then I sit on my couch and buy a plane ticket.
• Then I’m on the train and I buy a plane ticket.
• Now everyone is obsessed with… my browser magically buys a plane ticket for me?

No. “My agent buys a plane ticket on behalf of me”. Say it out loud to yourself. This is a 40 year old solved problem. When a human travel agent in 1995 buys a plane ticket for me, they do so not by impersonating my voice. They do so “on behalf” of me. The system knows the provenance of the fact that they did this. If I call up and buy a ticket myself, the final result is the same, but the records reflect the difference.

Every one of those shifts gave us a better tool (and specifically, expanded where we could use them). A laptop is a portable desktop. A phone is a pocket laptop. Each one widens the surface over which we can coordinate whatever it is we need to get done.

Each of these were power tools. The gas chainsaw was powerful. Then the electric hedge clipper let us garden more often and with less fuss. We didn’t throw away the chainsaw — we just had more tools in the shed. Each new paradigm is additive: it captures some use cases and opens new ones, but the old surface sticks around. But what if the next shift isn’t another tool for the shed?

The Jetsons’ Robot Gardener

We don’t interact with it in specific new AI channels. We just use the existing plumbing for how we coordinate with human actors. The difference isn’t just capability, it’s also relationship.

Notion and Perplexity and everyone can’t crack the nut of the next big thing in their apps because the next big thing isn’t going to be in one app. OpenClaw scratched the surface of this but got sidetracked with signal as a “control scheme”.

These are all going to need one thing: an email address. Or, more generally, a unique addressable identity. Once we give these things stable addressable identities, I think the floodgates are going to rip open.

(Email addresses aren’t cool on their own. The agent doesn’t even need write access to the email account. It exists to enable accepting the invite email from Linear, GitHub, Slack, etc: to participate in the systems humans already use, without those systems needing to be rearchitected as “AI Native”)

Your “coworker,” your “assistant,” whatever its scope and mandate — it’s an email address, a set of memory files, an event bus (message received → run prompt), and a cron job (every 10 min, run prompt — usually go right back to sleep).

That’s it. That’s the baseline:

• [A] Persistent unique addressable identity (“an email address”)
• [B] Thoughts can span interactions (memory files)
• [C] Can respond to your queries (event bus)
• [D] Can take actions proactively (“cron job”)

Every current AI product gets some but not all of these (and executes each with varying quality):

• Siri, Alexa, etc: C, only, nothing else
• Claude Code: B, C. a little D. no A
• Notion Agents: D, C, kind of B, no A.
• OpenClaw: B, C, D, flickers of A

This is textbook Clay Christensen disruption. Painfully so. Apple, Google, etc. desperately want AI to be a feature that fits into their existing platforms.

They’re all trying to put the power of Lt. Commander Data into a text input, but none of them wants to ship Lt. Commander Data. (Claude coworker? Come on, it’s right there)

(Now obviously on the show, Data can stand in the ready room and give his status report. Today that part is a robotics problem. But almost any meeting in the ready room on TNG could have been a space-Zoom call, or honestly just a space-email. The point is that the agent can converse, task, and be tasked — same as any other participant.)

A Clay Christensen style analysis

Disruption theory says incumbents fail not because they’re stupid but because they’re rational. They listen to their best customers, invest in sustaining innovations, and rationally ignore the low-end or new-market footholds where disruptors start. The disruption happens when the disruptor improves along a trajectory that eventually meets mainstream needs — at which point the incumbent can’t respond.

Map the ABCD framework onto the competitive landscape:

Google

Best structural position of any incumbent. They already give identities to everything (Workspace accounts, service accounts). They already have the event bus (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions). They already have the cron (Cloud Scheduler). Gmail is literally THE identity layer of the internet for a billion people. A Google AI agent with its own agent-for-bob@workspace.google.com that can send email, read calendar, book meetings, file expenses — they have every piece.

• Why they might blow it: Co-option. Google’s business model is ads, and ads require you looking at screens. An agent that acts on your behalf means fewer eyeballs. Every incentive pushes toward making the agent a feature of Gmail/Docs/Search (sustaining innovation) rather than an independent entity that reduces screen time. They can’t rationally cannibalize their own attention economy.

Microsoft/OpenAI

Second best structural position. Azure AD already has identity and delegation primitives. Exchange has had delegate mailboxes for 25 years. They understand “on behalf of.”

• Why they might blow it: Same co-option, different flavor. “Copilot in Teams,” “Copilot in Excel,” “Copilot in Word.” The agent transcends any single product; Microsoft wants it trapped in M365. Their enterprise customers are asking for “Copilot in my app” — and Christensen says listening to your best customers is exactly how you miss the disruption.

Apple

They have the identity (Apple ID), the device graph, and the most intimate user relationship. They could give an agent an iCloud email address tomorrow.

• Why they’ll almost certainly blow it: Apple’s entire philosophy is that the human is in control and nothing happens without explicit user action. An autonomous agent with its own identity that sends emails you didn’t individually approve violates Apple’s DNA. It’s not a technical limitation, it’s a constitutional one. And their best customers — privacy-conscious consumers — are explicitly asking them NOT to do this.

Anthropic/Claude

B and C, a little D, no A. Claude Code is the closest thing to the “coworker” framing, but it has no persistent identity in the world. It can’t receive an email. It can’t be addressed by other systems. Each session is an amnesiac (modulo memory files, which are B but fragile B).

• Where Anthropic could win: They’re the least encumbered by a business model that requires eyeballs or lock-in. No ad business (Google), no enterprise suite (Microsoft), no hardware-control philosophy (Apple). Their business model is API calls, and an agent with an email address that autonomously interacts with the world makes more API calls, not fewer.

• Why they might blow it: Safety culture could become resistance. “We can’t give the agent an email address because it might send something harmful” could calcify into a constitutional objection to A and D. Also, they don’t own any of the surfaces — they’d need partnerships with the incumbents who have incentives to block them.

Newcomers / Disruptors

The over-served market: knowledge workers who want AI to help them be more productive in their existing tools. Every incumbent is fighting over this.

The underserved market: small businesses and solo operators who need delegation, not assistance. A freelancer doesn’t want “Copilot in Excel.” They want someone to handle their invoicing. A 5-person startup doesn’t want “AI in Notion.” They want a back-office person who doesn’t exist yet because they can’t afford one. That’s a delegation relationship, not a tool relationship.

The disruptor is probably someone currently building a “toy” that incumbents dismiss. It’ll look like “an email address connected to an LLM with a cron job” and the first reaction from Google/Microsoft will be “that’s cute, but it doesn’t have enterprise security features.” By the time it does, it’ll be too late.

Interestingly, customer-facing agent companies (Intercom, Zendesk) are already building agents with their own identities — email address, memory, actions. They just haven’t generalized beyond customer support. If one of them realizes they’ve already built ABCD for one domain and generalizes it…

The dark horse: someone who builds the “agent identity provider.” Not the agent itself, but the identity layer. The way Okta/Auth0 became the identity layer for SaaS apps, someone could become the identity layer for AI agents. Issue the agent an identity, manage its permissions, handle the “on behalf of” delegation chain. Every agent builder would use them because building identity is a distraction from building the agent.

The winners will be whoever recognizes that the set of things worth doing has expanded, rather than doing the old things but fancier:

• Google, Microsoft, Apple will make agents a feature of their existing products. They’ll bolt an agent onto “user interacts with our app.” This is using the word processor to grade the same test.
• Anthropic has the best shot among established AI companies, but only if they make a bet that feels irresponsible by current safety norms — giving agents persistent identity and autonomy.
• The actual winner probably starts with the identity primitive, not the intelligence primitive. Everyone is competing on who has the smartest model. The disruption will come from whoever figures out that intelligence is becoming commoditized and the scarce resource is the identity and delegation infrastructure that lets intelligence act in the world.

Not “smarter AI.” Not “AI in every app.” Addressable AI entities with provenance.